Hell And Back
by KSipesh
Summary: The detailing of Cid Highwind's time spent in a Wutain POW camp during his time in the Shin Ra Air Force, and his struggle that followed. Inspired by my one shot "I Just Hit It On Something", though the story varies to some degree in its specific details.
1. Chapter 1

Hell And Back

Chapter 1

I don't make a habit of discussing certain things because, quite frankly, some shit is best left in the past. Still, now and then, even a perceived hard ass like me needs to vent some things. Maybe it's to set records straight, or maybe it's therapeutic—what it isn't, I'll tell you flat out, is a vie for any sympathy. Again, the past is the past and pitying me for shit that happed nearly fourteen years back isn't going to serve either you or me.

But I've got a story to tell.

If the ultimate outcome of this is that you understand where I'm coming from a little better, then that's just a side bonus. Mostly, I'm just writing this for me. I'm not getting any younger, and before my memories are stripped away by time, I reckon I ought to put pen to paper, spill my guts, and cry in my tea.

As you may have heard, I lied about my age to join the Shin Ra Air Force when I was just sixteen years old. I proved myself worthy, though, and climbed the ranks. This was facilitated by the fact that Shin Ra, at the time, had gotten themselves into a war with Wutai. Worthy pilots were becoming a scarce breed, since the Wutain antiaircraft defenses were legendary. By the age of twenty, I was an accomplished combat pilot, and made the rank of Captain.

All the while, back home, my high school sweetheart, Sarah Jane kept the home fires burning for me. I got some leave around my nineteenth birthday and went home to marry her. Right after that, I was deployed back into the fight that still raged between Shin Ra and Wutai.

The next time I saw Sarah Jane was almost a year later. I got leave after pulling some strings and went to spend some time at home with her. Sadly, that would prove to be the last time I would be with her. The first night I was home, she suffered an aneurysm in her sleep, and I awoke to find her dead.

Needless to say, the military extended my leave for a while so I could bury my wife and grieve for a time. During times of war, though, reprieves from work for a soldier are short lived at best and, before long, I was right back to the fight.

My life became completely and utterly devoted to my combat flying. I had nothing else really to live for after Sarah's passing. Besides, I loved it.

And if there was ever one thing I was the best at, it was flying.

By the time I was twenty one, the war had been raging for five years. Though I wasn't the oldest pilot in the conflict by far, I had twice as many kills as the next highest ace. I'd also been given command of several bombers, and had successfully completed over sixty-eight bombing runs. The record before me had been forty-two, the pilot holding that number going down in a blaze of glory on the forty-third.

With my record and my ability, I should have made a much higher rank, but Shin Ra purposefully kept me as just a captain, since they didn't want me coming off the frontline anytime soon. Fucking politics.

Either way, it was on my ill fated sixty-ninth bombing run that this story really begins.

I awoke at 0300 hours, to head to my preflight briefing. I was to lead a squadron of seven bombing airships over Wutai, to try and land a direct strike against their capital city. I knew the map of that country like the back of my hand by then. Though many of my previous runs had been to clear the path for this particular raid, I still had no illusions that it was going to be simple. In fact, I had a nagging ache in my gut that morning like I'd not known for some time.

There wasn't much time to dwell on that though, since it was only an hour later that I was at the controls of the flagship, heading off east toward our target. We had an escort of about twenty smaller combat aircraft, the type I'd piloted before being given control over the bombers. Naturally, I knew a lot of my guys weren't going to make it home from that one but… but that's war.

It wasn't until after dark, about sixteen hours after we'd taken off, that we were over Wutai. It was a long, exhausting haul to fly that far but I was a younger man and found it doable.

Shortly after crossing over into Wutai, we started to encounter resistance. The boys in our fighter escort did a damn fine job, though, leaving me and the other bomber pilots just to worry about the antiaircraft fire that occasionally burst in the sky around us. My ship was peppered a good amount, but she was a tough old bird, heavily armored, and the flak was just more of an annoyance to the big girl.

Our target came into range and I lead the charge, being the first to drop payload on the city. I was rewarded with a massive orange bloom below a few minutes later, showing that my crew had hit the mark as always. My fellow bombers dropped their munitions as well, and I let myself get a little cocky for a second.

We'd all made it in without any casualties.

Before I got the shot to pat myself on the back too long, something rocked my ship violently. The following moments are sort of a haze, but I remember one of my fighter escorts radioing me.

"_Highwind__, an enemy fighter just __kamakazied__ into your port side lift rotor!__ You're burning!__"_

My number was up, I reckoned. I looked over at my navigator, Lieutenant Curt Flemming, and we both collectively had one of those "Oh shit" moments.

My ship began to go down. As tough as she was, she couldn't stay airborne after a direct hit from another aircraft to one of her two lift rotors. Instantly off balance, she began to spin as she fell from the sky. I closed my eyes and prayed for what God would will in that moment. With the way she was spiraling out of the air, there was no way either Flemming or myself were going to be able to bail out. All I could do was hope somehow that maybe our bombardier or gunners were going to get out alive. We had a crew onboard of six souls, total.

I don't recall much after that, I reckon I blacked out.

When I awoke, it was to the sound of screaming. I opened my eyes to realize that somehow, I'd survived the crash. The morning sun was just beginning to creep up, giving an orange light to the scene. Copious amounts of black smoke were wafting over the wreckage, and I heard the screaming again. Though I'd broken the fibula in my left leg, I tried to crawl toward the source of that cry.

I knew it was Flemming from the voice. "Help! Oh God… please… someone… Captain!"

He wasn't really that far away from me, but he was pinned badly in the metal. The torso of our aft gunner was lying close, but he was obviously dead, Flemming needed my help. I struggled to uncover him, horrified at what I was confronted with.

Lt. Flemming wouldn't have been recognizable on sight alone. He'd been burned—I knew, I absolutely _knew_, he was a dead man from the extent of what had happened to him. Still, ignoring my busted leg, I just sat there, holding the hand he'd lifted toward me.

Like a lot of men in that sort of situation, he asked me how badly he was hurt.

…and, like a lot of men in the position of being asked that, I lied. "It's all right, Curt… they'll send someone in to get us. Yer jus' a little burned… Jus' hold on."

At the very least, he seemed to calm a little and didn't scream anymore.

I knew damn good and well that we were so deep into Wutai there would be no rescue. The fact was that we would be found sooner or later, and either killed or hauled off into a POW camp. Had I been alone, even with the broken leg, I would have made the effort to hide but…

…I wasn't leaving Flemming like that. Not a cold chance in hell.

Sure enough, it wasn't long after that when the quiet of the morning was broken by the shouts of Wutain soldiers. They had zero sympathy for either Flemming or myself. He was pulled, unceremoniously, from the wreckage, and we were made to walk. Truth be told, I practically carried the man for the two hour hike back to the camp. With a broken fibula, I wasn't exactly tearing up the path, either, but at least my leg wasn't completely broken, since my tibia was still intact. I could see that there wasn't a whole lot left of Curt's lower right leg at all, so I was just thankful to be better off than he.

Once at the POW camp, we were interrogated. I refused to give any information other than my name and rank. Despite the shape Flemming was in, he did the same. I can't express how proud I was of him, though it was tempered with the knowledge he had to be dying.

We were quickly inspected after that, and they put a splint on my leg, and covered Curt in bandages. Then they marked us.

It was a matter of public record that the Wutains tattooed ID numbers onto their POWs. I fought as they approached me with the damn branding gun. My fight was cut short, though. I was bound as it was, and then when one of the guards kicked my broken leg to get my attention… well… it got my mother fucking attention.

Soon, there was a sting to my left temple, the permanent mark having been made. I was Wutain property, and I knew the chances of me ever getting back home were slim. The Wutains were not known for their hospitality when it came to POWs.

Before long, my right wrist was shackled to Flemming's left, and the two of us were thrown into a small cell. It wasn't big enough for me to stand in, not that I could have, given the fact I was chained to Flemming, and he wasn't getting up.

Night came along and we were given a teacup full of rice. Curt was barely coherent, the pain he must have been in, I can only imagine. I fed him all that we'd been given in some sort of futile gesture.

It was hot there, and the insects were intolerable. There was constantly something crawling on me, and I did my best to keep the damn things off of Flemming, but they were determined to get beneath the bandages he'd been covered in.

To my surprise, he was still alive the following morning. The dressings on his body were a sickly orange color though, and wet. I was hoping that at some point they'd at least come along and change his bandages, since they'd bothered to put some on him in the first place. The day came and went, though, and nothing. Watching him made it easier for me to ignore the pain in my leg.

…and somehow, Curt was still alive. Every few hours he'd come around enough to say something or other to me, and I would just try to assure him that we'd be rescued. That night, we were given a piece of something similar to hardtack bread. As I'd done with the rice, I fed it all to Flemming.

I don't know if you've ever had the unfortunate circumstance of having to be near someone that has been virtually cremated. It was bad enough that the cell area we were confined to had no bathroom facilities… but the stench of being kept in our own waste, coupled with the smell of burnt flesh—it was close to the ninth level of Hell. I thought it couldn't get much worse.

But it did.

By the third day, a new odor joined in. It was the reek of Flemming literally beginning to rot from infection. How on God's Earth he was still alive I didn't know. Luckily, by that point he was blind. The burns to his face had messed with his eyes or tear ducts to the point where his eyes were just dry and gray. I say that he was lucky because it spared him from seeing that he was being eaten alive. There were maggots falling out of his bandages. I tried at one point to take those dressings off of him but it caused him so much pain that…

I honored his pleas for me to stop.

Curtis Flemming, First Lieutenant, and a close friend of mine, kept right on fighting. I know anyone else would have died within the first day, but he was tough. It wasn't until the sixth day that he seemed to finally resign to his fate.

"Cid… please… kill me…" he begged.

I wish I could have, I really do. "Curt… c'mon, guy… they'll be here any minute to take us home."

"Just strangle me, Captain, please…" His dead, gray eyes were in my direction, sending a twinge of horror through me.

"No, an' don't ask me again," I said, trying to sound resolute.

"Yes, Sir."

He didn't ask me again. In fact, he didn't say anything else to me at all. Though he'd lived for close to a week in that physical state, by nightfall he was succumbing. Toward sunset, he'd started having seizures. I'm not a doctor so I can't explain a lot, other than I reckoned that the infection had just finally gotten into his brain.

The seizures got progressively worse, and though I was reluctant to touch him, I did my best to hold him down, since his thrashing was tearing off bandages as well as chunks of decaying flesh from his body.

In the middle of the night, those seizures began to weaken and mercifully, they stopped all together when he died. That was a hard moment, since he was the last fragment of my life before the prison camp there was. His was the only English speaking voice I had to hear.

I'd figured that in the morning the guards would see that he was dead and take him away.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

Sure, they knew he was dead, but they left him right there in that tiny, filthy cage with me.

…for a week.

They still offered me bits of food but, I'd nearly always vomit within an hour of eating, so awful were my circumstances. The smell was so God awful, not one that you could acclimate to. No, it was always there, thick in the air, worse by the minute.

Being trapped with a festering corpse fucks with you. Needless to say, my own wounds became infected, and I began the ritual of pulling maggots off of myself as they would swarm over from Curt's body in the night. More than once I swore I heard him saying things to me. It's a matter of fact that a dead body will produce noises as they bloat and expand. Curt would groan, bletch… and I'm sure with a little imagination you can figure out what else it did as the gasses within built up.

At the end of that week, I was able to unchain myself from Flemming's body. Only by virtue of the fact that his hand decayed to the point where the tissue on it sloughed off, making it easy to slip off the shackle from his wrist.

I knew I had to get out or die.

When the guard came by that night with my miniscule ration of rice, I laid by the front of the cage, trying to act too weak to move. He reached down to set the bowl in front of my cell, after which he traditionally pushed it inside with his boot. However, once he set it down, I sprung to life and reached for him as quickly as I could.

I took him by surprise and got a hold of his arm, pulling him against the bars. There was a bowie knife he carried on his belt, and in a fluid motion, I grabbed it, and then brought it up and drove it into his neck, cutting off his cries for help. He fell dead before my cell within seconds.

The guards that fed us didn't carry keys for the obvious reason that we'd try to get them. Still, given the crude nature of my enclosure, and having that sizable knife, I quickly set to trying to pry open the latching mechanism.

By the grace of God alone, I popped that lock open. Not having been able to stand for nearly two weeks, and still being pained by my leg, those first steps out were agonizing. Being that it was dark, I couldn't make out a lot. My cell had been inside a small fenced in area, and I passed a few others as I ran. They held nothing but dead men.

I got over the low fence and headed into the forest, getting as far as I could before I collapsed in sheer exhaustion.

It was a joke… When morning broke I realized I was resting up against another fence. The first barrier I'd scaled had just enclosed the cages. This perimeter fence had extended into the trees, and I'd probably run in circles the night before. The second fence was not something I was going to get over in my state, and I knew it.

I considered the knife I held for a good, long time. It was a way out, and I won't lie, I gave it some serious thought. All I had to do was cut somewhere that would count, and I'd be done with it.

Something stopped me, though, and I just stabbed the blade down into the dirt next to where I'd sat. Sure enough, guards came for me, guns drawn, a few minutes later. I was just too Goddamned tired to fight.

My little escape attempt earned me a good beating, but it wasn't without its benefit. See, after they were done kicking me around, I was taken to a different area of the camp. I was thrown into a different cage, one that I notably, did not have to share with a decedent. Still, having to wallow in piss soaked mud wasn't ideal, but being away from poor old Curt had its charms.

The next day, I was pulled out of my cell and put into slave labor. Maybe they figured that if I was well enough to kill a guard and run that I was fit enough to work. Why they didn't just kill me I don't really know, unless they figured I was a good bargaining chip. Bum leg or not, they saw it fit to use me as a fucking farm animal.

Since the war had been raging for close to five years, and Wutai had been hurting economically, sheer survival had driven them to eat most of their livestock, including the working animals. Being that it was still a fairly… unsophisticated agrarian society… they didn't have machinery to work their fields.

So, I found myself soon harnessed to a fucking plow that I had to drag through acres of rice paddies. The little bastard that became my 'handler' was a mean son of a bitch. He used a driving whip to keep my ass on course as I hauled that small plow back and forth, day after day.

I noticed, though, that the amount of area I was able to cover in a given day directly translated to an increase of the food I was given. On a good day, I'd be granted not only a decent sized bowl of rice, but even a small cup of tea. Having anything other than the piss tainted water on the cage floors to drink was like heaven.

After several days in the new cage, in the night, I came to realize that I was hearing Morse Code tapped out. There were other men near me, but the line of sight between the cells was blocked, and we were strictly forbidden from speaking.

To dare and try to call out to another man promptly got you urinated on by one of the guards at best, and at worst… well, I never bothered to find out what 'at worst' was.

It wasn't easy training myself to make out Morse Code without something to write on, but since time was all I had on my hands, I learned. The guards didn't understand that our faint tapping was out and out communication, so we were able to get away with it. I learned that none of the men there were from my bombing mission. That gave me hope that the others might have made it home. The guys there had all been captured at different points in the war, and were all of my rank or higher. During the work day, I'd occasionally see the other men, but since we were never allowed to talk, I didn't know who was who, though I had a good list of names in my brain from our coded messages.

There was a guy amongst us, by the name of Colonel John Laron, who was our self appointed record keeper. The man was able to remember to the day the length of each of our incarcerations. John, himself, had been there the longest, nearly four years. I never asked him to remember the length of my term there, though. I really didn't want to know, but I knew it was getting to be a long time.

It was clear that Shin Ra wasn't coming for us.

Every few days, one of our compatriots would stop tapping messages. That was a sign to us that the man in question was dead. Inevitably, though, they would be replaced with a new victim, and that was the extent of our social interactions. Tapping on the bars.

Being out and working in the wet conditions I was in, I still continued to have infected lesions on my body. Some nights I'd be up, shivering. Not that it was cold out, I don't think it ever got below 85 degrees F there, but because I'd get fevers. I knew I was sick not only from my infected wounds, but undoubtedly I'd contracted Malaria since I was covered in mosquitoes as a matter of course.

Things were just grim.

Then, it happened.

There seemed to be a commotion and I could hear the various cells being opened up. Soon, a man that I'd come to appreciate as the leader of the POW camp, came and unlocked my door. I was herded with the other survivors and we were all sent to march.

We figured that our time was up, and that we were being sent out to our executions, though not a word passed between us. Being lead to an open field by our armed guards, I reckoned we were just minutes away from being shot full of holes and left to rot.

We weren't, though. The guards stood by, but didn't do anything. The other men and I were all so programmed not to speak that we kept our silence.

And then I heard it.

The unmistakable drone of a military transport airship.

When the drab green bird appeared over the tree line, well, that was damn near a religious moment for us. She landed before us in the field, and honest to God Shin Ra soldiers emerged, ushering the lot of us onto the craft.

The insides of those old transports were Spartan at best, with just nylon mesh seats along the walls. I staggered over to one near a tiny round window. I collapsed into my seat, and rested my head against the glass, the blessed feeling of getting airborne again pulling at my stomach.

Though I didn't look, I could hear several of the other guys break down and start sobbing. I won't lie, I myself had tears running down my cheeks as I watched the ground grow further away. The thought we were finally free… well, there's nothing in the world that can compare to that.

Nothing.

There were medics on the ship that made the rounds, checking each of us. They'd ask each man his name and rank, then radioing that information back to Shin Ra.

When they came to me, I got the same routine as the other men. "Name and rank."

Not having spoken in God knows how long, it took me a second to find my voice. "Captain Cid Highwind."

The medics stopped and looked at each other. "Captain Highwind?"

I flashed them an annoyed but exhausted glare. "Ya deaf?"

One of them took up the radio. "We have Captain Highwind."

I looked to the other man for some sort of explanation.

He gave it to me. "Sir, your entire squadron was lost, but your bombing run seven months ago obliterated the Wutain's ability to manufacture arms. That's what finally brought them to the negotiation table. You're a hero. A truce was finally declared last night, hence why you're all going home now."

Seven bombers with crews of six, and twenty escorts with crews of two; eighty two men, of which I was the only survivor. Pardon me if I wasn't overjoyed to hear I was a fucking hero. A lot of men, far better than me, had died on that mission. I had no right to be alive. All I hoped was that the others died the night of the bombing run and hadn't been left to suffer like Lieutenant Flemming.

I never really knew.

To hear that I'd been there for seven months… while that was a long time, it'd felt like I'd been there for years. Still, it made me appreciate others like Colonel John Laron who _had_ been there for years that much more.

It was like a dream to be going home. All I wanted was a plate of catfish, a cigarette, and a good, long shower.

((A/N- There will be a chapter two. I guess my damn Cid muse couldn't let me rest for very long.))


	2. Chapter 2

Hell And Back

Chapter 2

(Warning: There will be a racial slur in this chapter, but understand the mental state of the POWs at that point.)

The flight back to civilization took the better part of the day. After all, it'd been a 16 hour flight to Wutai from base, so it only stood to reason that the journey home would be just as long. For the most part, after the simple shock of being rescued abated a bit, most of us just fell asleep where we sat.

I have to mention that at this point, other than talking to the medics as each of us had, still not a word was spoken between the sixteen of us that had been taken away from the camp. No celebratory discussion, nothing. We were all that programmed after our stay in Wutai, that not a one of us even thought to talk.

Then again, we were also just dying of sheer exhaustion.

I was awoken from my nap (which in retrospect had lasted the better part of ten hours so it hardly qualifies as a nap) when the ship finally set down and the cargo bay doors opened. The group of us made our way off the ship, being all taken to the hospital on the base.

Mercifully, we were asked if we wanted to been seen by the doctors first or if we wanted a shower. I, and the rest of the men, all opted for a shower before anything else.

Taking off the remaining shreds of the uniform I'd been wearing for the last seven months, and then standing beneath a good, hot blast of water was hands down the best feeling I'd ever had. It's funny how something that you took for granted every day before an event like that suddenly became better than sex. I'll never forget how black the water was as it ran down the drain between my feet. I scrubbed for probably the better part of an hour, fearing that any of the stink from the camp would remain once I was done. The other men were all doing exactly the same, too. Still, not a word was said amongst us.

Clean water. Clean mother fucking water. For the last seven months I'd come to think that all water left in the world either was in rice paddies an' muddied, or what they put in the 'horse trailer'.

I reckon I failed to mention the 'horse trailer' thus far. Since, though, it would turn out to have a bearing on some things for the rest of my life, I'll elaborate. This was one of the 

punishments or tortures, whatever ya want to call it, that the Wutains kept for us. I don't know what it was really called, I just always figured that the word the Wutains used around the damn thing sounded like 'horse trailer' to me. Besides, it was basically a metal box sunk into the ground, with a door over the top of it that had, at some point, been on the back of a livestock trailer. Really, it was the septic tank for the Wutain's officer's barracks in the camp. When you'd gotten on their bad side, a frequent punishment was to be taken and thrown into it. Then they'd close that lid, giving you about 4 inches of air space above the sewage.

I'd had the displeasure of being put into it once after my escape attempt. I don't know, really, how long I was kept in there, but it was surely more than a day. I made damn sure never, ever to get put in there again. To this day, I don't like being in water other than to shower. Swimming, being immersed? I'd rather not, thanks. Some things are just a mind fuck.

Once cleaned, we were inspected briefly. As should come as absolutely no surprise after the conditions we'd been kept in, the doctors decided that we were all riddled with parasites. That said, we were all taken and had our heads and beards shaved off, before we were sprayed down with some ungodly chemical. That made me, for one, want to run right back in the shower since it burned, especially where I still had open sores. Of course, that meant pretty much my whole body.

When I say that we had our beards and heads shaved, I don't want to give you the wrong impression. It so happens that a side effect of malnutrition is your hair ceasing to grow much and starting to fall out. In truth, there wasn't a whole lot on my head, nor on that of any of the other men who'd been there for any length of time TO shave off. However, my beard was still relatively impressive, since even at that age I'd been able to work up a good five o'clock shadow after shaving in the morning. I guess facial hair hangs in there longer than what's on your head.

After, we were sent for our individual exams with the doctors. We got to wait for our turn in the room where we'd be kept for the immediate future.

As was typical of the military hospitals at the time, we were all kept in a ward together, our beds lined up, eight to a wall, in one room. They took us back in no particular order, and I was the sixth to go.

I was stripped out of the boxers I'd been provided with and scrutinized. Not wanting to watch as they washed out my wounds, I sat with my eyes closed. Though it hurt, it was nothing compared to what I'd just been through and I sat quietly as I was treated. The doctors spoke 

about me, using words I really just didn't understand, aside from the occasional mention of abscess, infection, and their medically sterile use of the term "insect larvae".

Once they'd treated my external injuries and had me bandaged here and there, they began to question me about various scars and other things. I was made to explain to them the assorted tortures that I'd been put through over the months, all of which they wrote down in silence, with the occasional nod punctuating their listening.

I was x-rayed extensively, and they discussed the findings of that with me. They said that I had several fractured ribs in various stages of healing and that my left leg had mended itself, though not perfectly aligned. I didn't really care about that, though. I was able to walk just fine even if it wasn't ideal.

Next, they took a sample of my blood for whatever.

Then, they requested another 'sample' to check for internal parasites. Now, I made have just spent over half a year without any dignity what so ever, but I found the remaining spark of defiance that I possessed. I refused. They told me that it was to determine if I had intestinal parasites and that it was for my own good. I reminded them that I'd just been in a shit hole for the last several months, and working in a rice paddy that the locals used for a toilet. Of course I had intestinal parasites! I didn't need to give a sample for that! Besides, how in the hell was I supposed to 'unload' when I'd hardly eaten enough lately to have anything to even evacuate?

They backed down after a brief argument, and just agreed to treat me with the appropriate medications to get rid of whatever may or may not have been living in my gut.

And with that, I was allowed to return to my bed.

In short order, a nurse had me hooked up to an IV line as was happening to all the guys when they returned from their exam. I was so dehydrated that I was actually able to feel the difference the fluids being dripped into my vein made. I can only equate it to being a dried up sponge finally dropped in water.

Still, all the IV fluids in the world weren't going to help my dried throat and I asked the nurses for some water. I was informed that we were only going to be allowed small drinks and meals for the time, since there was a danger of us actually making ourselves sick if we went overboard.

So, I was handed a small paper cup of water.

I remember sitting there in my bed, holding the cup. Before that moment, I'd never really appreciated the fact that clean water has a smell all unto itself, but it surely does. You would have thought I'd been given a glass of pricey wine by the way I inspected it before finally drinking. That was heaven.

After all the guys had done their round through the exam routine, we were fed. Our dinner wasn't very fancy. Some toast, a small portion of boiled chicken…

…and rice.

Not one man in that room, no matter how hungry, touched that fucking rice. Simply put, there was zero to no chance that any of us were ever going to eat that shit again.

There was, though, served up a cup of tea. Now, while I had occasionally been given a cup of tea while in captivity, it was such a novel and wonderful thing back then that it still equaled a gift from God to me. I took my sweet time nursing that teacup, loving every last drop of it.

If the water before had been heaven, then the tea was concentrated liquid sex.

I even went so far as to ask the nurse in hushed tones when she collected my dinner tray if I could possibly have a second cup. She glanced around nervously, before quietly agreeing to bring me another if I didn't rat her out.

For the time being, that nurse was the love of my life, second to the tea, of course.

That next cup was even better than the first, since she'd gone to the trouble of putting just a little sugar in it for me.

Shortly thereafter, it was lights out.

Once dark, and with the nurses gone, the strangest thing happened. We still hadn't rightly spoken to one another, but once alone…

I'll be damned if John wasn't the first to start tapping against his bed rail, introducing himself. I turned my head to the left, because it happened that he was in the bed next to my own. I couldn't help but laugh a little, as I followed suit and gave my name to the others, by doing as he'd done, clicking my bed rail. The introductions continued in that way around the room until we all finally were able to put a face to our comrades in that dim hospital nightlight. We were just so damn hard wired not to speak… Then again, though we were out of Wutai, we were still all confined, weren't we? Our circumstances were different, but for the time being, we were still all prisoners together.

Not long after, we gave into our continued exhaustion, and fell off into sleep. That night, we were so spent that nothing remarkable happened. Finally, we were awakened by the nurses coming in with our breakfast.

Now, that breakfast was more in line with what I was wanting. A bowl of hot cereal, a scrambled egg, and a small slice of ham.

With a cup of tea.

Amen.

I downed it all quickly, and took the load of pills the nurses set on my tray. It's true that your stomach shrinks over time when your rations are small, and though the meal presented was less than a fourth of what I would have downed back in the day, I was stuffed to the gills.

Our IV bags were switched out and we were escorted, one at a time, to the bathroom. Though I was lead there, I was allowed to go inside and take care of business on my own. Then, I was given a toothbrush.

Once again, one of those stupid simple things… but it was great. I gave my teeth a good cleaning, before finally daring to look at myself in the mirror.

Hand to God I didn't recognize myself. For starters, the last time I'd laid eyes on my reflection, I'd been close to sixty pounds heavier, and I'd had hair. The skin around my eyes and nose were dark from all the outdoor labor I'd done, however, where my beard had grown in and had since been shaved, the lower half of my face didn't match at all. Not to mention, there were patches of red where the skin infection I'd contracted had been at work eating away.

I looked so gaunt… honestly, I couldn't stand to be there staring all that long. I would make it a point after that to not look in the mirror for a good long time, until I was looking a little more like the Cid I recognized.

Back in my bed, I looked around at the other guys. It was only then that I dared to try and talk to any of them. I looked over at John. "Colonel?"

His head snapped over toward me, his eyes looking pleasantly surprised. "Captain?"

"Howdy… Feelin' all right?" I asked, not really great with conversation but starved for it nonetheless.

The older man turned onto his side to look at me straight on. "That's… quite an accent you've got there, Captain. I'd figured that you'd sound… different."

I had to smile. Like John, I'd assigned him a voice in my mind as well. Since he'd been our record keeping guy, I'd given him a typical nerdish voice. However, the man spoke in a gravelly, low tone. Funny how our minds work. "Yessir, I reckon I do compared to most. I was born an' raised in Rocket."

"Good old country boy," John replied with a growling laugh. "But as to your question, I'm actually feeling great. Yourself?"

I gave a nod. "Goodly… I was jus' happy to see a fuckin' toilet finally."

That earned me another laugh. "What, you didn't like having to whiz through the bars of your cage?"

For the first time since I'd been shot down, I laughed. I honestly fucking laughed. "Truth be told… I generally saved it all up an'… pissed myself when I was waist deep in the rice field."

"North field, or the south?" he asked, aware that one of the paddies grew what was fed to us, and the other was reserved for the Wutains that ran the camp, respectively.

"Don't worry, I always waited for the south."

John smiled, revealing to me that he'd lost many of his teeth along the way. "Good work, Captain."

"Can I ask ya somethin'?"

The colonel gave me a nod. "Of course."

"Seemed to me that… you an' the other guys could all understand what the Wutains were sayin'. Did you understand it before ya got there?" I asked. Honestly, I'd only managed to make out a handful of words during my captivity. Then again, I'd never been linguistically brilliant.

"No, I picked it all up as I was there, just like most of the other guys. You never figured it out?" John propped himself up on an elbow and quirked an eyebrow at me.

Well, if that didn't make me feel like a retard right there. All I had managed to learn was at the end of the whip out in the rice paddy. "Naw… All I learned was forward, faster, right, left, and stop."

"Well, that's all you needed to do your job there and survive. They had me in the officer's quarters during the day, acting as their Goddamned maid. I got a lot more contact with the little bastards, and had to communicate with them. No shame there, Captain." John gave me another toothless grin.

He and I continued to BS about things for a while, and it wasn't long before the other men seemed to follow our lead, breaking their silences and speaking amongst themselves.

John eventually drifted off for a nap, and I sat listening to the other guys. Most of them were talking about going home to see their girls, a conversation I couldn't rightly join into under the circumstances.

As that day progressed, everyone seemed to relax a little more. All thought of 'God, don't let this be a dream' seemed to evaporate. We were examined again in the course of the day, injuries tended to once more, and medications continually injected or presented in the form of pills. Toward evening, we were ushered off, one at a time for something else.

I was the first to go. Taken to a smaller room, I was sat down, and then a doctor entered. He sat in a chair before the exam table I'd been put on, and started to ask me questions.

It took about five seconds to realize that he was a psychiatrist. Personally, I wasn't really thrilled about the situation. He went right into rather painful questions about what I'd endured. Quite frankly, at the time, that was really the last thing I felt I needed. My answers to him were curt and simple as a result. I just didn't want to talk about it.

"You seem to have a lot of hostility, Captain. I want to assure you that it's normal for you to be feeling like that right now," he said at some point, continuing to write about me in the notebook he held.

That pissed me off. "Hostility? I jus' don't wanna talk 'bout this shit right now! Relivin' the last episode of my life really ain't on my top mother fuckin' list of things to do today."

The pretentious bastard just nodded, and wrote some more.

I opted that I wasn't going to give him anything else to write about and fell into an obstinate silence.

Needless to say, I was soon released to go back to my bed.

As the hours passed, and other guys were sent in to be shrunk, I just talked to John when he was awake. When someone would return from their session, I couldn't help but study them. They always returned with one of three emotions. Either they came back mad at the world like I had, blank, as though nothing had happened, or… they were crying.

The ones that came back in tears, well, I pitied them, I did. I also tried not to make it seem like I noticed their red eyes or jagged breaths, because they already seemed so ashamed. It 

did make me wonder about the different things we must have all gone through, though. Maybe the fact of it was that I was lucky to have gotten through it how I had. I mean, I felt relatively mentally intact, and my body wasn't injured in any real life altering way.

I can't say that for some of the other guys.

One, named Major Steven Hemmings, was missing his right hand. I came to learn later that it had been cut off when a guard had caught him picking a discarded piece of fruit out of the garbage heap that it was his job to tend. He'd been a concert pianist before joining the military…

Another, Lt. Jared Westin, could barely walk. Apparently, his ankle had been busted during his capture, and it had reset itself sideways. He eventually had surgery to try and straighten it out a bit, but even after that he would have a noticeable limp. I've had the pleasure of seeing him a few times since those days, as he kept working for Shin Ra while I was in the Space Program.

Having rested for two days, I think we were slowly getting our sleep cycles back on track. Maybe because of that, we didn't seem to fall into the profoundly deep sleep we had before. Instead…

Well, that's the night the flashbacks began.

It was the youngest member of our group that it happened to first. It was only about an hour after lights out, when all the sudden Captain McGreggor started screaming. I was still awake when it occurred.

"Get off of me! Get off of me you fucking slant!" he yelled, thrashing around in his bed.

John was the first to move. He got out of his bed and pulled his IV pole with him across the room, just as someone else turned the lights on. "Captain! Wake up and snap out of it!"

McGreggor was blanched white, sweating, and looking up at the colonel like he didn't know him from Adam. "They… they were doing it again…"

"No one's doing anything to you, Billy," John replied, in an almost fatherly way.

The captain immediately just broke down, crying.

The fact that the Wutains even now could hurt us started to sink in with everyone. Capt. Billy McGreggor may have been the first to suffer a flashback, but he wouldn't be the last. Not by a long shot.

A nurse ran in soon, and McGreggor was offered a sedative to get him through the rest of the night, which he readily accepted. In fact, several of the men asked for them at that point.

I should have.

Because I was the next one to go off.

Sure, I feel asleep after the lights were turned off again. From the outset, though, it was rough going. I was having dreams, one melting right into the next. All from various times in my captivity.

It was when my mind slipped into a replay of one of the 'interrogations' I had while in the camp that it got out of hand. Probably about half way through my time there, I was taken from my cage in the night, and dragged into a building. Seeing as that I didn't know Wutain, I had no idea what I was being yelled at or questioned for that night. The man that had initially interrogated me when I'd gotten there, who spoke English, wasn't present.

After a good amount of screaming in my face, as I sat tied to a chair, they decided to get creative with me.

I can't even really write about what was done to me, even all these years later. It was hands down my worst moment there, and I still get nauseous if I think on it at all. Whatever the worst is you're imagining, short of them having cut off my manhood, is probably close to what was done. Regardless, I seemed to leave the dream state, and come into full consciousness, where it was really happening to me again.

I was yelling and fighting, trying to stave off that attack again, feeling the pain clear as day.

When I finally came around, I was laying on the floor beside my bed, my IV line ripped out of my arm, my nose bloodied as I'd busted it either in my fall to the tile or in my thrashing thereafter.

Once more, it was John that had come to the rescue. He was holding me down flat on my back, his hands on my shoulders. "Highwind! Come back! It's not real!"

For the first few seconds, I swear to you, he looked like a Wutain officer to me, and I continued to struggle. Then, suddenly, the haze cleared and I could see him for who he really was. I didn't break down crying, though, like Billy had. Instead, I just felt angry and fairly ashamed.

I was soon hoisted back into my bed, my IV site washed and bandaged, my face cleaned up. The nurses didn't even ask me if I needed sedation, just sticking a needle into my arm and injecting me with some form of tranquilizer.

Within ten minutes, my world faded and I was cast down into a much quieter sleep.

I wasn't as mentally 'okay' as I'd thought.


	3. Chapter 3

Hell And Back

Chapter 3

Prior to my imprisonment, I'd never given two shakes of a lamb's tail about mental fucking health. Of course, I suppose that's just human nature—you don't think of things you can't really relate to until they're sitting on your doorstep.

I'd had rough times. My wife had died, I'd spent the last several years of my life in the military facing death day in and day out. Never though, had any of that made me question my sanity.

Even while in the camp, I didn't really feel that my grip on reality was slipping. The fact of the matter was that I was in survival mode. There was no need to construct the horrors in my mind because at the time, they were just a matter of course. I didn't have nightmares about the beatings, because they were plenty real during my waking hours. Going through those kinds of things leaves you so burnt out at the end of the day that to be honest, it was rare that I even _had_ a dream while in that POW camp.

After though, being in that hospital something strange was happening to most of us. There was no more torture, we were free from that. The horrors were gone. I'm not a shrink and I can't really get my mind around most psychology but over the years, I developed a theory as to what happened to us as a group.

In the camp, our brains changed. In order to survive what we had to endure, the entire way our minds worked had to mold to the situation. We became conditioned, for lack of a better word, to live off of that stress. The various routines we went through, from our slavery to our beatings somehow shaped our mentalities. Whereas before the situation, the thought of what we went through on a daily basis would have been horrifying, once IN that setting, they became the norm. Our base line for reality, for what was and wasn't considered suffering anymore to us, rose to a point where the average day in that camp, though awful, to our inner souls was just life as it was.

So, once we were removed from that situation and safely held away in that hospital, our minds tried to fill in the blanks of our need for a given level of torment. It was as though subconsciously, we kept that bar raised in the event, God forbid, we'd find ourselves in a parallel circumstance. The means for that maintenance of our acclimated stress and fear levels, therein, became the flashbacks. Our minds were sending us back to that camp, so that we wouldn't forget, so that we wouldn't become complacent or soft again. Some weird, masochistic, internal mechanism for keeping us forever unsure when the next torment from our time as POWs would spring up on us.

Simply put, we were no longer designed for life outside of the camp, and by God our minds weren't going to let us forget it. That was the real legacy of the Wutain's torture. Most of our physical 

wounds would heal, the scars would fade. But our brains, fundamentally and irreversibly, had been altered, and it was something we were all destined to take to the grave.

The next day after my first flashback passed in somewhat of a haze. The sedative they'd injected me with had been a whopper, and my body just wasn't clearing it out very fast. Not only that, but I was then off my IV fluids which probably would have helped, but as I'd mentioned, I'd torn out that line during my episode and for whatever reason, the nurses didn't replace it. I did force myself to come around enough to take my meals and my tea, though, since my body was growing expectant when it came to hunger again.

There's another point. We'd been starved, that you know already. Hunger though, turns out, isn't something that just gets infinitely worse until you eat. It's completely a conditioned sensation. For the first few weeks I'd felt hungry at times when I wasn't outright sick. Anyone can understand that. But over time my ability to feel or recognize my own hunger started to fade. It came to a point where that craving took a back seat. I mean, everyone knows what it feels like to be hungry and to go without. When you're suffering that, you're stomach takes a nice, front row seat in your mind. Give it enough time, though, and that sensation moves back a row in the theater every so often. Eventually, it just seemed to go away. We weren't going to be fed much, so our bodies stopped really expecting it, even as we were wasting away toward death. I'm not saying that we forgot completely, but it came to a point, at least for me, where I would consciously have to consider whether or not I still felt hungry on any level.

Does that make sense?

Either way, my damn stomach got with the program real quick after rescue, and one again it was demanding three squares a day, whether I was stoned outta my gourd or not.

The following night every man in that room requested a sedative. I think it wasn't just the fear of seeing what I and the other captain had gone through, so much as the feeling of their own eventual freak out looming in their minds. It was going to happen, the question was just when. Even sedated, the visions crept back in. I had nightmares the second night, drugged or not. I just didn't make the leap to full blown flash back, making me bash my face into the floor.

That night, though, John, toughest man in our room hands down, even with a healthy dose of tranquilizer aboard, ended up popping. His moment wasn't quite as melodramatic as mine had been, but I do remember him in the night, sitting up straight in bed, shouting in Wutain to his captors in whatever conditioned manner he'd learned to do. It was enough to wake me, and being untethered from my IV, I struggled up and went to him, placing my hand on his shoulder. He'd been a good man to get me and McGreggor out of our delusions, so by rights I was going to help him.

I forgot that his initial instinct might be to fight. The second my hand connected with his shoulder, the colonel swung at me with the meanest right hook I ever had the displeasure of taking. 

Already unsteady from my sedation, I reeled back and into the side of my own bed again. The son of a bitch had connected with my nose—keeping in mind I'd busted it the night before.

In that moment, fuck the colonel. My head felt like it was going to explode from the shook of a repeated injury to my face. I know I was cursing a blue streak, keeping my head down against the mattress, feeling my sinuses immediately fill with blood. It fucking hurt.

If there was anything good that came out of it, though, it was John snapping back into reality and realizing in short order that he'd fucked me up a good one. I felt his hand on my back after several moments, and though pissed and tempted to take a swing at him myself, I couldn't really do that. First, he was bigger than me and could have put me in my place, my elder or not, and secondly, hey, I knew he'd not done it on purpose.

"Highwind! Son… damnit, you don't casually come up on a man in a flashback!" he reprimanded me, as though I would potentially make the same mistake twice.

Come on, I'm not that fucking stupid.

I groaned and sat up, finding a nice pool of blood on my sheets. "Yessir…"

Once more, the nurses sprung into action. John was returned to his bed and given something a little stronger to put him out. I was lucky and got my nose stuffed with cotton and my sheets changed before I, too, was put back down. The throbbing from that busted nose would ache at me for days to come. Before all that, I know this sounds vain, but I'd had a great Goddamned nose. That was now history and I was forever left nicely hawk nosed following that bullfuck. Internally it was messed up, too. After that, the slightest damn bit of congestion would leave me pretty much a mouth breather.

Damn it all.

Then the following day our lives changed, yet again. It was announced by one of the doctors that had been tending to us, that we were going to be given a new medication designed to help thwart our flashbacks. Of course, all of us being desperate to be rid of the nightmares and visions thought this sounded downright great.

Around noon, in walked someone that none of us had ever seen before. Thin, with long, greasy black hair and a pair of spectacles that looked on the verge of falling off his pointed nose. I know half of y'all already are sitting there knowing that I'm speaking of one Professor Hojo. None of us knew him from Adam at the time, but he was about the most unkempt looking excuse for any sort of medical professional that we'd yet to lay eyes upon. He made his way from bed to bed, writing various facts down about us from what he observed. However, he never spoke a word to any of us. He was being followed through the ward by some sort of younger assistant, who would read the Professor our medical charts or whatever the guy asked for.

When he was at my bedside, going through my records, I couldn't help but get the chills. Not only did he look pretty damn weasly to me, he stank. Not like people normally stink, but it was like he took a bath in every chemical known to man before arriving. Remember the smell of your high school biology lab? Kinda like that, but worse. I was not sad to see him move on to the next bed, I'll tell you what.

After he finished his rounds, we were left to our own devices for a time. Then, one of our doctors returned to clue us into what was going on. I can't remember his little speech verbatim, but I do recall the basic gist of it. Professor Hojo had approved the lot of us to receive a new Shin Ra pharmaceutical called Ferium. It was supposed to be safe, and it was sold to us under the pretense that it would clear our fear and anxiety, leaving us better suited to readjusting to our lives.

Well, that sounded damn great at the time. Mind you, I was a young man, who still trusted Shin Ra, as flawed as they were. If they had a drug that would ease what was going on in my head, you bet your ass I was going to sign up.

…and that's literally what we did. We all had to sign releases stating that we gave the company permission to carry out their little drug trial on us. Had I been a smarter man, I would have read that contract's fine print, but I didn't.

Once the paperwork was all done, the nurses returned. They had syringes lined up on a tray, filled with some clear, blue liquid. It was the Ferium, and one by one, we were given our doses intravenously.

I closed my eyes and didn't watch as the needle was put into my left arm, but I felt it, and I definitely felt the sting of the drug burning up my vein for a moment after I received it. I laid back, awaiting whatever it was going to do. Within moments, it worked through my bloodstream and into my brain. I actually felt all of my emotions, good and bad, melt away. The constant replay of the POW camp's drama in the back of my mind tapered away into absolute mental silence. It was the strangest feeling I ever honestly had.

My mind was just… quiet. My thinking wasn't impaired, so to speak. I suddenly possessed a crisp clarity in thought, my logical side suddenly at the forefront of my mind.

As the nurses finished up and retreated from the room, I found myself looking around at my counterparts. Their expressions were all the same, and I knew I looked just like them in return. There were no smiles or frowns, just a slack look of something nearing surprise but not quiet getting there.

I looked over at John, before being the first to speak. "Hey, Colonel, how did it make ya feel?"

His gaze slowly panned over toward me, his voice seeming a little monotone. "Empty at the moment. I'm sure as we get more used to it, we'll feel better or… more normal."

That was good enough for me. If John had faith, then sure as hell I was going to. Deciding that I was tired since my sleep the night before had been disrupted, I settled back and enjoyed my new, silent mind with a good, long nap.

Man did I ever sleep! I was so out of it that I actually missed lunch. I figured that my body was just trying to catch up now that real sleep was finally possible. Dinner did get my attention, though. I came around, still feeling that eerie sensation of emotionlessness. I talked with John about it over our small portions of turkey and peas. He was feeling more or less the same way, so I opted to dismiss it for the time being.

After dinner, we were all very briefly examined and then allowed to call it a night, with no sedation given. The hope was that the Ferium would keep us blank enough that we would be able to rest. Not too long after lights out, it was evident that it was working. One by one, we all drifted off and I was no exception, getting through the whole night without a peep.

When the morning light started pouring in, I awoke feeling much more rested. I opened my eyes and looked around to see a few of the guys out of their beds, clustered around one on the far wall. Shaking off the last of my sleepiness, I got up as well, walking over.

They were all looking at Lt. Grissom Murdoch, as he lay in his bed. It didn't take too long for me to realize that the man was dead. Nothing was being said, everyone just in a sort of silent reverence. From the looks of him, he'd just died in his sleep, probably several hours before. All the color was gone from his skin, his lips a pale blue. I, like the others, basically wrote it off to the fact we'd just been through so much that it was inevitable that some of us wouldn't survive the recovery.

We all just stood, looking. I wanted to be angry or sad or _anything_ but found that there was just no emotion within me. The drug they'd put into us the day before worked with such horrifying efficiency that even death of a comrade left us unaffected. Had I been capable of feeling fear at that thought, I would. My mind was under the reign of the Ferium, though, and so the only conclusion I could come up with was having been able to feel the stress of Grissom's death wouldn't have helped my own condition. Therein, I was accepting the drug and what it was doing to me.

Not too long later, the nurses and doctors came in and began to fuss over the body. That awful Professor Hojo appeared before too long as well. He did a quick check of the body where it was, before nodding, snorting, and walking out.

Soon enough, the Lieutenant's body was taken from the room, leaving just fifteen beds. An hour later, the nurses came in with our second dose of Ferium. As per our treatment, we were all going to be kept on it for a minimum of one week, and then taken off at our own discretion. Had I possessed any sense at all, I would have refused that second injection, but I didn't. I was incapable of doing so in my present state.

Again, that blue liquid was pushed into my vein, and I watched. I saw the needle go into my arm, the small red plume of my blood appearing in the barrel of the syringe making the Ferium almost purple. The nurse flicked off the tourniquet, and then hit the plunger, sending it all into my bloodstream. It still burned, physical sensations weren't diminished from the drug, only emotion.

Some of the men discussed the death of Murdoch amongst themselves. Their voices were flat, though, and the things they said just basic relaying of facts regarding the man. No hint of mourning or regret. Even Maj. Morton Amery, who I knew to have been friends with the guy didn't seem fazed. Again, if I'd had my right mind, I would have realized that the Ferium was starting to look really dangerous.

Nothing remarkable happened for the rest of that day, or the next. However, on the fourth day of our Ferium treatment…

I was making my way back to my bed from the bathroom, seeing Capt. Lee Hollis coming toward me, presumably to go do what I just had. His color didn't look too great, though, and as he passed me, his entire body seemed to go rigid. Lee drew in a strange shaking gasp before just dropping like a rag doll onto the floor.

My reaction to this was muted by the Ferium coursing through my veins. I watched him fall, but didn't really say anything. I knelt down and pushed him onto his back, getting my hand to his neck to check his pulse.

There wasn't one. I stood back up and simply walked out to the nurse's station, telling them quite blandly that Major Hollis was dead and needed to be removed from the room. That done, I turned and went back to my bed and lay down. Some of the other guys went to check the body, but again, there was little to no reaction amongst them.

I heard John turn onto his side and look over at me. "This isn't right."

My head lulled to the side to see him. "Sir?"

"This isn't right. We shouldn't be this nonchalant about our men dropping. This shit they're putting into us has made us zombies, and how do we know it isn't what's now killed both Murdoch and Hollis?" he asked, his face not giving any expression as he spoke.

I did have to think about that statement, emotions or not. The man had a point. "Then I reckon we should ask fer the autopsy results on Murdoch for our own information, Sir."

"I'll do just that." John, who had been since taken off of his IV fluids, stood up from his bed and went over to the doctor and nurses now descended around Hollis.

I watched from my bed as he spoke in low tones to them, before he came back over and lay down again. "Sir?"

He folded his hands neatly on his stomach. "He said Murdoch died of heart failure brought on by his prolonged starvation. He said it's not unusual for people to die from that sort of thing even after they've started eating again."

Maybe I nodded, I don't know, but I accepted that answer at face value. "That makes sense."

"I'm not going to take my next dose tomorrow," he announced to me in a mundane fashion. "The flashbacks aren't fun, but I don't like feeling… or rather, _not_ feeling."

Turning to face him proper, I considered his choice. "Then I won't take anymore, either, Sir."

"You're a good man, Highwind. Loyal to a fault, you know. Hope your nose is feeling better." With that, he closed his eyes and drifted off into sleep as Hollis' body was carried out of the room.

We were down to fourteen men.

(Chapter 4 in the works)


	4. Chapter 4

Hell and Back

Chapter 4

By Kris Gupton

Good ol' John and me had made our pact. Further Ferium treatments were going to be a no go with us, though we did expect to take some flak from the medical staff over that. Emotionless or not, we knew, logically, that the deaths of Hollis and Murdoch were more than just coincidental to the drug trial. It could have been wracked up to paranoia on our parts that maybe, even despite the claims John had received otherwise, that the Ferium was to blame in those deaths. Still, it wasn't worth the risk, as we'd agreed.

So, it was on the following morning, after our breakfast of scrambled eggs and hash browns which fell on the fifth day of our drug trial, and at the conclusion of our first full week outside of Wutai, we made our stand. The nurse first came to my bed side, as that was the order in which it was done, and I refused to give over my arm. Granted, I was still without my feelings from the prior dose, but I had my resolve intact. "I'm gonna decline further treatments…"

The nurse had looked at me, dumbfounded, and before she voiced her protest, the colonel cut her off. "I'm not going to get anymore, either."

She spun around and looked at him, then me again, before huffing and walking out of the room, carrying her tray of syringes with her.

John and I shared a blank stare toward one another, noticing that all the other men in our room had taken notice of our protest and had started to whisper amongst themselves. However, that was all silenced when a very annoyed looking Hojo stormed into the room and between John's bed and mine. "…need I remind you two _subjects_ that you signed a waiver, agreeing to receive a minimum course of one full _week_?"

It may just have been that I was glad for a second there I was loaded on Ferium, thus avoiding an emotional response to the way he'd spit his words out to us. Surely if I'd had my senses, I would have gotten up and decked the fucker. He'd, in that one sentence, shown us exactly what we were to him. Not patients, but subjects for his little project.

We were rats…

My lips parted to start a reply, but John beat me to it. "Maybe we did, but it's making us feel wrong and when we've lost two men in the course of just a few days, it brings up concerns."

I'm fairly sure that in the back of John's mind, just like mine, there was a small, caged version of his formerly emotional self that was gnawing at the bars to put a helluva lot more force behind his words, but damn the drug… I watched Hojo's reaction like a mindless drone.

He curled his lip, before reaching up and pushing his gold framed glasses higher up his nose. "You military types have the most pathetic, non scientific minds… It is for the reasons of that doubt why the trial must progress as directed. I suppose that is beyond your comprehension. I will remind you, further, that your life belongs to Shin Ra, whether it be for active duty, or whatever the company so desires to do with you during your conscripted time. Is that within the scope of your understanding?"

Yeah, I could definitely feel the inward, emotional, but restrained Cid Highwind screaming at that point. Maybe the twenty four hour lapse was causing me to regain that sense of something more with this sort of… instigation before another dose. Hell if I knew, it's not like the emotion was outright, but I knew it was in there somewhere, still.

When I looked at the colonel again, I could see that he was clearly coming to that same kind of resolution within himself. He sat up tall in his bed and leaned toward the scrawny little fuck. "I said no. Highwind says no, too. Now, I have a feeling, a good idea, in fact, that the others in this room are probably deciding to join our little refusal party, thanks, in large, to what you've just said. We may still belong to Shin Ra, but I'm willing to bet that the fourteen of us remaining could put up a decent fight."

It looked like blood was about to shoot out of Hojo's eyes or… hell, he could have spontaneously combusted for all I knew. In hindsight, that would have been the best result, but he didn't. Damn it all.

No, instead of flying off the handle in his rage, that bastard seemed to be able to immediately can his own emotions. "Well then, that is very disappointing to hear. If you change your minds, however, and I do believe that you _will_, the Ferium will be waiting with the nurses. Good day."

John looked over at me as Hojo simply put his hands behind his back and then strolled out at a casual pace. When the scientist was out of earshot, the colonel spoke to me. "…do ya feel that?"

I didn't need clarification to know what he meant. "…part of me is… starting to feel really pissed off."

He gave a wise nod, before relaxing against his bed again. "Good, so am I… that means it wasn't permanent…"

The old guy was right, of course, though we had no idea what we were in store for, yet. For those intermediate hours between breakfast and lunch, most of us in the room were quiet. Slowly, bit by small bit, my emotions were resurfacing. It was maybe an hour before lunch when John said something to me that actually struck me as funny and I laughed. Honestly, that was a relieving moment. Systems the Ferium had suppressed were coming back online again. I thought that maybe we were going to be okay again.

Hindsight, follies of youthful blind optimism, whatever.

Lunch came and went. Club sandwiches, if you're interested, I think it was. Hell, maybe it was roast beef. There was bread involved, that's all I can say for sure.

The reason I can say it was bread, was the simple fact that about half an hour after I'd finished, I started to feel bad. Really bad. That general sort of malaise that settles into your body the day before you break with the flu or what have you. My muscles were starting to feel like they were going to cramp throughout my body, and a cold sweat broke across my skin before much longer. I knew what the natural progression was when I felt like that, and I got up to try and head toward the bathroom, already feeling my stomach start to turn.

Like most folks, I rank vomiting pretty high up on my list of things in life I detest most, and I didn't quite make it to the toilet before my entrails tore loose and I heaved. If I hadn't felt so damn miserable, I might have given some mind to the fact I had spilled my guts all over the bathroom floor and part of the sink, but my only real concern was trying to steady myself so I didn't end up falling face first into the splash. My head was feeling like someone was pushing in on either temple, threatening to collapse my head, and my ears were filled with a static drone. My eyes, in that nauseous tunnel vision I had, focused down on the floor, and an errant bit of bread crust that I'd purged.

Ergo, I remember it was a fucking sandwich.

Regardless, I felt a hand upon my back after some small elapse of time, and I heard the voice of Lt. Col. Dell Gottard behind me. "Cap'n… are ya all right?"

I tore my eyes away from the mess I'd made and dragged my left hand across my mouth, before looking at the guy. "Tossed…"

"I see that. My stomach's been bothering me, too, since lunch but not that bad, yet. Lemme get ya back to your bed." And with that, he slung an arm around me and started to take me back to my bed, whether I wanted to go or not. I looked at the others as I was lead back, noticing several of them looked ashy and not unlike I felt. Some were sitting up in their beds, trying to rub at their own cramping limbs, others held their stomachs. I thanked Dell for his help before crawling back into my bed, and looking over at John.

"…I think we've got us a virus going around," he said before I ever asked. Not looking like he felt so well himself, he flashed me a dissatisfied look, as though he didn't sincerely believe his own words.

I can say that I was on the same inner track that he was. We were getting the first look at Ferium withdrawal, that was the long and the short of it.

Before I got much more of a chance to lay there and get philosophical over the whole shit storm, another lost his lunch. It was Maj. Morton Amery, who hadn't even had the chance to try to get up to go to the bathroom (ruined as it was) or even head to a trash can. No, the poor son of a bitch just rolled onto his side and let it go onto the floor. Now, I dunno if it was one of those chain reaction things, or the fact that most of us were getting hit with the same sensations, but within minutes, four more guys seemed to repeat his action.

Whatever the case was, I knew if I hung around much longer, I was going to barf again myself, so aching muscles or not, I forced myself up and out into the hallway. I flagged down a nurse, informed her that everyone was puking, and then dragged myself further down the hall.

I didn't get real far, though. Maybe ten yards from the door at best, before my legs buckled and I slid to the cold floor. Being only dressed in a pair of boxers with a hospital gown draped over my torso the cold chills that were setting in seemed even worse. I'd be damned, though, if I was going back into that room while it was a pukefest. Though I was going to be relegated to dry heaves if I did, still… I'm not that kind of masochist.

I half sat, have lay there supported by the wall, staring off toward a window in the distance. My heart was racing away under my ribs and I was struck with that feeling that I'd pass out if I tried to move any further. I could hear nurses and doctors scrambling behind me, trying to take care of what was going on back in the ward room, but I seemed to either be unnoticed or not cared about.

Honestly, I couldn't have cared less. I felt sick, I hurt everywhere, and wanted to be alone. Funny that 'alone' meant lying in some ungodly position on the floor in the corridor, but such was the case. That pressure on the sides of my head seemed to still be there, and I looked down at my hands, seeing them shake. My feelings that had still been somewhat muted then flooded back tenfold. If I'd thought the flashback I'd had prior was bad, what suddenly washed over me in those moments was far worse. The reason being is that in the flashback, I wasn't entirely conscious, but this time, I knew I was…

It was like a screen was pulled in front of my vision, and while I could still see through it to my hands, visions of all sorts of hellacious shit started to play in front of me. I gave out a groan I think, and tried thumping my aching head against the wall to get it to stop, but it didn't. Soon, the inevitable happened, the worst thing I'd seen in my life floating there in my line of sight—Sarah's face the morning I'd woken to find her stone dead before me. Only then did I scream, though it seemed a distant sound to my own rushing ears.

It must have been a good one, though, because it was then that someone noticed that one of the patients had 'escaped'. A male orderly came over and tugged me up, starting to talk to me as he basically dragged me back toward my room. I don't have a clue what he said, though, all I could do was see my dead wife's dull eyes.

There was already a furious clean up detail working in our room, trying to rid the room of the evidence left on the floor and beds. Several of the guys had gotten up and were sitting in a small huddle beneath the one open window at the end of the room. Obviously they'd migrated there to try and escape the stink. I was taken toward them, and allowed to drop.

I was half way lying onto another man's side, I simply didn't have the strength to right myself from where I'd been deposited. I may have been leaning against Hemmings or Armstrong, I have no real recall on that. My mind was trapped in itself, and judging from how no one else was saying anything, I think it's safe to say that the others were slipping into the same sort of delirium.

After a time, the male nurses were back, hefting us into our beds.

This was when things went from bad to worse.

Upon being lain out on my gurney, I felt something being placed on my wrists. I was, like all the others, being physically restrained to my bed. Having just come out of captivity at the camp, the feeling of restraint did spark some real terror within me, and I started to struggle. I was no match for the orderlies in my present state, though. I was tied, wrists and ankles, to the bed railing, and I wasn't going anywhere. Sarah's ghost cleared out of my vision after a time, and I looked around to see the others all tied up like I was, their eyes reflective of the same fear I had.

Fear and questioning. We all wanted to know what the hell was happening to us, I knew it. After being trapped together for as long as we did, maybe we'd developed some sort of hive mind about certain things, but regardless… Not one nurse or staff member seemed willing to say one word on it.

In retrospect, I'm sure that was Hojo's order. Most likely he'd already known what sort of reactions we were going to have, at least to some degree and had, by then, assigned himself as the only person allowed to address us as a group. About an hour after we'd been tied up and then seemingly abandoned for a spell, he came in.

Sadly, it would seem that from my initial protest, he zeroed in on me as some sort of figurehead for the lot of us. He came to my bedside and leaned over me, giving me a brief visual exam. "This is your reward for refusing your dosage this morning. Are you regretting it now?"

I wasn't really sure how to respond to him, but a rescue this time wasn't coming from John's bed, since he was laying there, just writhing against his restraints, off in some God awful vision. I met Hojo's gaze, my own jaw aching with how tight I'd clenched it. "…ya knew this would happen? Why the fuck'd ya give it to us?!"

"Omelets and eggs, as they say," he replied, going to the end of my bed and tipping up my medical chart for a moment. "Captain Highwind… My plan was to give this to you for a week, then to attempt to taper you off, to see if we could avoid such a reaction. However, you decided to make waves, didn't you?"

"You never explained that to us! If'n ya had, I'm sure we…" Hell, I wasn't even strong enough to keep up arguing. My head fell back against the pillow again as I found myself winded from just that previous outburst.

"Well, now we are in the midst of an abrupt medication stop study," he said, as though he was discussing the weather. "In a few days, it will be out of your systems. I assure you, you will be compensated, does that make it better?"

From the way I was feeling, I wasn't sure there was any sort of compensation that would ever be worth it. Doubly so if the men that had already died had done so from the Ferium. "Heh… send my ass to space," I said, in what would be a sadly prophetic statement.

The professor, or whatever he was to be called, he sure as hell wasn't a doctor at the very least, gave me a leering smile before turning to leave the room. "I will ensure that the lot of you are sedated through the withdrawal period."

I started to fight against my ties; that panic setting in again. A fleet of nurses soon came in, giving each of us a whopping dose of something into our upper right arms. It was done without any ceremony, we were all injected. It stung like a bitch and then the nurses, seeming scared in their own right, filed back out.

I know in movies that when someone is injected with something in the muscle of their arm they seem to generally drop within seconds. Truth of the matter is, though, that it takes a few minutes depending on what you're given.

I'll be damned if I knew what I was given, but after about ten minutes or so, my body quit cooperating, and soon, I was in a nearly paralyzed state, consciousness somewhat intact. The room grew silent as all the others were flat out like I was. My eyes would open occasionally and I stared at the ceiling, but I could do no more than that. Sometime later, I returned to consciousness to realize that a new IV line had been put into my arm, but then I blacked out again.

What happened for the next few days I don't know. I was kept in that helpless state, sometimes only hearing, occasionally seeing, but having no sense of time at all. I do, though, remember the pain. Every muscle in my body burning as though they'd cramped for hours on end. There were rare sounds from the other men, animalistic noises, indicating to me that they felt it, too. If only I'd been able to lift my head and look, but I couldn't.

Days… again, I'm not sure how many, but I'm willing to bet around three or four. There were no calendars in the room, never had been. There was no way to tell anymore.

Finally, I opened my eyes and found that I could, weakly, move. I was still tied, though, an IV in my arm, and from the more than slightly uncomfortable feeling down in my cock, well, hell, I knew I had a catheter going up there, too. Makes sense, I guess, since we hadn't been trekking ourselves to the bathroom by any means.

My body felt tired, as though I'd run a marathon or two. My muscles still hurt like sin but I could lift my head. What I saw made me wish I hadn't.

On the day of our drug refusal there had been fourteen beds.

Now, there were only six.

Six.

I looked to my side, feeling some measure of relief to realize that John was still there, though he looked like death. I proceeded to take a small mental roll call.

Survivors: Col. John Laron, Maj. Steven Hemmings, Lt. Jared Westin, Maj. Morton Amery, Lt. Ross Osbourne, and myself.

Now missing that had been there when we'd been sedated: Capt. Billy McGreggor, Capt. Brayden Lockhart, Maj. Cory Armstrong, Lt. Sebastian Howard, Capt. Octavius Eitan, Lt. Col. Dell Gottard, Capt. Zachary Julyan, and Maj. Wystan Clemmins.

Once again, a lot of men missing, better men than I, and though I had yet to be told or asked if they were alive or dead, I knew. I knew it in my heart instantly, and felt my eyes burn. "…Colonel…"

John shifted slightly against his restraints, probably looking toward me, I don't know, I had my eyes closed again. "Yeah, Captain?"

"Six…" was all I could manage to say.

"I know, soldier, I know…"

I had to hear at least his belief on it, so I asked, "Do you think… it was the Ferium?"

"I don't know, Highwind, and if we want to get out of this alive, for right now, I think we'd be best to not go speculating about it," he replied, voice flat. It wasn't a suggestion, it was an order.

I nodded and twisted a hand up in my sheets, opting to do as told for the time being. There weren't many of us left to tell the story, it was time to cooperate and play dumb.


	5. Chapter 5

Hell and Back

Chapter 5

By Kris Gupton

For the first day out from under our several day run of sedation, neither John, myself, or any of the other four men still present said much. Frankly, we were dopey as hell, I reckon it takes a bit of time for that kind of shit to get out of your bloodstream.

Still, though, the colonel's words upon my question to him when I first came to echoed through my mind. _I don't know, Highwind, and if we want to get out of this alive, for right now, I think we'd be best to not go speculating about it…_

We'd been military dogs for years. A lot of that was hold your tongue about shit you may or may not know. Be good boys, keep it under your hat. Never question why.

This wasn't really any different, was it? …was it?

I had the feeling in my gut that if I even considered finding out, I'd end up the eleventh former POW in the morgue. After all I'd been through to survive up to that point that was a notion which didn't seem ideal or really worthwhile.

John was a smarter man than I was, I would do whatever he so said I should do. That was the long and the short of it.

Regardless, we were left tied to our beds for the rest of the day. It was the following morning when Hojo emerged from whatever hole he generally crawled off to when not stinking up our room. As he had before, he came to my bedside first, giving me a quick visual inspection. He picked up my medical chart and scrawled something across it, before speaking. "Captain… Highwind… Do you feel yourself to be in an alert state of mind?"

From the tone of his words, I fully think he expected me to retort with something insubordinate, however, I had John's command, and I, the good, faithful lap dog I could be, responded in kind. "Yessir, I do."

He looked at me over the rim of his dirty glasses, tapping the end of the pen against my record. Maybe there was something bordering on surprise behind his eyes, I don't really know, I was trying not to stare. "And how would you say you are feeling in general?"

Goddamnit, it took everything I had to give a little nod and a smile. "Good, I was sorta groggy yesterday but, now I jus' feel like I need a good stretch an' some eats."

Inwardly, I think I envisioned spitting on him or worse. That's where the smile actually came from that lingered after I'd said my peace.

Hojo kept his gaze fixed on me for a moment. I think he was trying to figure out my level of sincerity. His lips tersed before he licked them, lowering my record. "I see. I'm certain that can be arranged."

I kept up that retard smile I had and gave another nod, before letting my head tip back and hit the pillow once more. From that pose, I watched as the professor moved onto the colonel next, picking up his medical record. He asked the same questions, and though he worded things differently, John gave replies that were lock step with mine. All of us had to be on the same page, I knew, and I lifted my head again. I met the gaze of Lt. Westin who was straight across from me, and he gave a curt little nod. _We're all onboard, Captain._

Hive mind, remember? We'd learned over the past months or years in some cases, how to communicate without a word, and it was serving us one more time. I panned my eyes over toward Maj. Hemmings, receiving the same unspoken answer. All systems go, we all knew what to do.

It was a few minutes later, after Hojo had completed his rounds of the room, getting similar responses from each of us, when we were all alone again. In case we were being listened in on, the instinctual silence we'd learned with such careful discipline in Wutai settled in over us. We knew, oh God in Heaven we knew there were two possible outcomes for us. Either Hojo would decide that we were intimidated enough to be silent, a pot Shin Ra would undoubtedly sweeten with our 'compensation', or we'd be killed. I hoped we were on the road to the former.

I know that in a world of idealism, heroes are supposed to stand up for shit even at the risk of death, but in a world of idealism, I wouldn't have spent the last seven months of my life, wallowing in my own filth, struggling to survive only to die after my rescue. Fuck no. Call me a coward, call me what you will, but if we survived and got out, then would be the time to stand up to the company and try to affect some sort of change.

That's what I told myself at the time, though, not realizing I would continue to be nothing more than a whore to the company for years to come. I had to delude myself that I had some semblance of dignity or self respect left. Survival mode, no more, no less, and I will neither make excuses for that nor for what followed.

A while later, the nurses returned. One by one, our restraints were taken off, and in a final humiliating act, that fucking urinary catheter pulled free. In that moment, I grabbed my IV pole and quickly (though unsteadily) hauled ass into the bathroom. Having that thing yanked out made me feel like I had to piss like a racehorse. However, once I was inside, I stood there for probably five minutes, waiting. It turned out I didn't have to go at all, it was just some sort of urethral spasm as the nurses said when I came back out, looking a little… unsettled.

I got back into my bed and was presented a respectable breakfast before much longer. Steak and eggs, not exactly the sort of breakfast one is generally offered in a hospital, but I wasn't going to question it, not by a mile.

After getting that down, we were again left alone. I looked over toward John at some point, and he gave me the same sort of short nod I'd received from the others during our interrogation. _We're okay, we're going to get out of it,_ he'd said without saying.

_Yessir,_ I nodded right back, before rubbing at my wrists. They were sore from the restraints, after all.

Before lunch time, again the nurses came in, and our IV lines removed. I supposed since we'd all kept breakfast down without issue, they figured it was safe. That turned out to be correct.

My body still ached, though. I have visions of my body having been locked up tight, every muscle tensed like all fuck during my time sedated, but that could have just been my imagination or a dream. I ached, I felt strained, period. When the nurses would come, though, we'd all look pleasant as hell. Just a nice relaxing Sunday or whatever day it was. You get what I mean.

It was a male nurse that came in just a bit later and ordered me out of bed and to follow him. I gave John one look, hoping for some sort of reassurance, not knowing what was going to be done to me. He simply lifted his right hand and gave me a salute, one that I instinctively returned to him. That was goodbye, somehow, we both knew it.

I followed the orderly out and into the hall, down to the showers. I was ushered inside and allowed to wash up, brush my teeth, and even shave the scant bit of stubble that had grown back in since my arrival there. Once done with all that, I was handed some clothes and instructed to dress. A pair of fatigue pants, a plain gray tee shirt, some socks, boxers, and boots. With that all on, I was then handed a set of dog tags, identical to the ones I'd worn when first captured in Wutai, but subsequently torn off me at some point during my captivity. The last thing that was done, was the nurse came to me with a bit of medical tape, and covered the Wutain POW mark on my temple. I didn't understand why that was done at the time, later on it would sink in, and it would be a habit I would continue myself for decades to come.

So, with me looking a little more like a human being, I was directed back into the hall, then into a small side room. I was left inside for just a few moments, before someone I had never seen before in my life entered. An older man, with dark hair, and looking a little haggard. He came over to me, holding out a paper. From the suit he wore, I knew it was a Turk, and I was officially on company business.

I took it without looking really, finally speaking. "What's this?"

He glanced at the paper in my hand, before meeting my gaze. "Captain Highwind, that is the prepared statement that you are about to give to the media waiting in the next room. You are a hero, it is known that your bombing run signaled the end of the Wutain war machine. Furthermore, it outlines your future goals with the company with which you are being rewarded given your valiant service and particular abilites. Do you understand?"

My eyes slowly drifted down to the paper and I gave a shallow nod. This was the compensation, as well as a public lock in that would go around the world the moment I was in front of those cameras. I was a whore, a damn whore, and I was going to do what they wanted, just because…

…because I had nothing else honestly to do with my life.

"Now, we understand that you have been under great duress given your recent ordeal," he said in his somewhat gruff voice. "We dearly hope that your mental state holds up. It would be a shame after this offer if you were to suddenly start to suffer… paranoid delusions. Do you understand, Captain Highwind?"

Pride. I'd once been a man full of it, to a fault some would say, only equaled with my stubbornness, but reality was quickly stealing what I had left. Like I said, I was now a corporate whore, nothing more. I didn't know what was on that paper still, I wouldn't until I read it before the reporters, the wolves, waiting next door. Swallowing down the last vestiges of dignity that may have survived, I nodded and met his gaze. "Yessir, I'm… grateful fer… what the company has done. I know my compatriots from the camp will also, undoubtedly, be jus' as… honored."

I might as well have flicked the proverbial angel off of my right shoulder in that moment. That's how it felt, anyway.

The Turk gave me a false smile, before motioning toward a door. Paper in hand, I went forward, giving a deep breath before facing the flashes of assorted cameras. I was disoriented from all of it, honestly, but knew somehow what to do. There was a table between the reporters and I, two doctors at either end, who rose up upon my appearance. Everyone there started to applaud me, though I still couldn't quite understand a reaction like that. I'd never been famous before, it was something I was going to have a hard time getting accustomed to.

One of the doctors spoke first. "Everyone, be seated. The captain has prepared a statement for you all. We would like to remind you that he is still recovering from his ordeal, and so we would like to avoid any interruptions if we can. He's not up to taking questions afterward, so upon finishing what he has to say, we will end this conference."

The media pool obeyed, sinking into their seats and growing quiet, though there was still the occasional flash. There was one chair left at the center of the table and I went to sit there, as it seemed what I was supposed to do.

I held the paper in my hands, shaking badly. Public speaking was a fear of mine up until that point but I knew I had no choice. After a quick and forced thanks, I focused my eyes on the paper and started to read what had been written on my behalf.

"Seven months ago, my squadron was ordered into the heart of Wutai, our target, their only remainin' weapons facility. Given our superb trainin' in the Shin Ra Air Force, we were able to complete our mission, though there was great personal sacrifice involved."

"My ship didn't make it home, due to a mechanical failure, forcin' me to make an emergency landin' behind enemy lines."

I stopped for a moment and swallowed hard. It had been sanitized… heh… fucking edited for the sake of company glory. Over eighty men lost, pared down to just one ship not returning home from a mechanical failure… horseshit. However, I forced myself onward. "I was taken into Wutain custody, where I was held in conditions in accordance to the… Mideel POW Act, passed over twenty years ago."

So my torture had been stamped out, too… Unbelievable. I don't think one of those little fuckers in that camp holding us had ever even HEARD of the Mideel POW Act. Goddamnit. That's why my tat had been covered with the tape. Permanent marks were forbidden according to the pact, so from that moment on, I knew I was supposed to hide it. Why they wanted to make the Wutains look better after all that shit I never quite figured out, but I'm not a political man, never was.

"However, my mission had ultimately been a success, an' it was because of it, that the war was eventually ended, an' the POW's being held in Wutai were released. Six men in total. I would have made this public statement sooner, but as you can understand, there was some recovery required, as well as debriefings to go over prior to this engagement."

Once more I paused. Reading this was selling my soul to the devil, plain and simple. Ten lives had just been written out of the public record. There were only a few lines to go, though. I think I cleared my throat. "Now that the war has ended, an' peace reestablished, Shin Ra has enlisted me to assist with the new Space Program…"

My heart stopped for a few seconds at that, or so it felt. I'd always dreamed of being the first man in space, but to now have it offered like this… Part of me wanted to protest still, but the selfish part of me that would take hold for the next several years blazed to life, a fact that shames me to this day. "…S…Space Program… d…due to my superior abilities in design work, an' the company's belief that I am the right choice to be the first man in Space, within the next s…six years. I am grateful for the opportunity I had to serve in the Air Force, an' I will show it by workin' in this new department, and makin' the dream of manned space flight a reality. Thank you."

I was applauded again, patted on the back by the doctors, and then escorted from the room and away from the flashes. In my hands I still held the paper, rereading my pre-assigned fate.

Space flight. It had only taken my immortal soul to get it, too. Well, that and ten lives in the hospital, eighty some odd more in the war from my squadron. What a deal…

From there I was immediately taken from the hospital and put onto a helicopter back to Rocket Town. The former satellite lift station was to be the site of my future launch.

At least I was home… but I was very much alone. It was the first time I'd been back to the house since my leave at the time of Sarah Jane's death. People in the town I'd known all my life were diluted out with the scores of Shin Ra people now there. Those that did know me, treated me differently than before. Always with some sort of pity in their looks. Sometimes I'd overhear them talking behind me in the store.

"There's Cid… poor thing… losing his wife and then being held captive for so long, I wonder if he's still in his right mind after that. Going into space? That sounds insane."

Raised my hackles each time I'd hear it, but I never replied. There was no point.

I was allowed a few more weeks of recovery at home while Shin Ra set up their new launch facility in the small town, all the while I wondered what had become of the other men. I had no way to contact them, but they never left my thoughts. None of the others seemed to get a press conference in any event. I guess I was the squeaky wheel. Months later, I did meet Lt. Jared Westin as he was sent to Rocket Town to consult on various aspects of the project. Though my time with him was limited, I was able to find out that the others had been released as a group a day after I had been turned free. All of them had been given rather… cushy jobs for the company with good paychecks attached to keep them silent.

It was always Col. John Laron who I thought of the most, though. Westin hadn't been able to give me specifics on the older guy, and I never really seemed to have the time to look him up on my own. Years went by, and the rocket launch neared. I met Shera and helped her rise through the ranks on the Shin Ra 26 Project. Everyone knows how that story went, though.

I didn't see nor hear of or from John until nearly twelve years after our release. Mind you, twelve years after our release takes us right up to the time immediately following Meteor. I had come home and married Shera, then trying to settle into something along the lines of a normal life.

Then the phone rang on a Tuesday afternoon. "Highwind Shipyards," I'd answered, as Shera had run to the store. Normally she was on phone duty.

There was a brief pause before I heard that deep, dry voice reply back. "Captain? How are you doing, soldier?"

Without even being told who it was, I knew. Maybe it ain't manly to admit, but I felt tears in my eyes at once. "…Colonel? John? Is that ya, pard?"

He laughed a little and told me it was, that it was good to hear my country boy accent again after all those years. I landed at the kitchen table, feeling a mix of happiness and to some degree loss as I talked to him. The phone conversation went on for nearly four hours. I told him about the failed launch ages before, meeting Shera, the ordeals of Meteor, so forth. He disclosed to me that he only felt safe talking to me then because Shin Ra had been knocked back several pegs. I understood what he meant and I agreed. After all, he'd always been smarter than me.

He came out to Rocket Town after that. I gave him the tour of my new hanger and ship building business. He told me about the position he'd been given as the head of the Air Force flight instruction school until his mandatory retirement a few years before. His wife had waited for him during all of his years in captivity, and his already adult children now had kids of their own. His missing teeth had been replaced, and instead of the thin being I'd known in the hospital, he was one of those round, jolly types, I guess you could say. He looked good, gray hair and all.

In the end, it didn't sound like his life had turned out too bad, but I could see something behind his eyes that I knew he could see in mine as well. That secret we'd carried for all those years, how the lives of ten of our comrades had been lost for the company's blind ambition and greed.

I'd had my revenge, of course, having seen to Hojo's demise myself, even if Vincent had put the final bullet in the fucker. I told John of that and he'd bowed his head for a moment, giving me a quiet thanks, and telling me that he would never forget our other men.

I never forgot them, either.

Nov. 8, 2008

Capt. Cidriel Augustus Highwind, Jr.


End file.
